As product managers and designers, our job is predicting the motivations and influencing the reactions of people we’ll never meet.

This is an absurd task.

And so in absurdity we must rely on intuition to build a blissfully simple product that feels revolutionary to all those users who haven’t yet signed up.

Why does it need to feel revolutionary? Because the point, surely, isn’t to retread the steps of others and employ the same old design patterns.

And even if we end up standing on the shoulders of giants, we should at least begin by employing first principles.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.